This Chanukah, we need solidarity not unity

While the story of Chanukah is often taught to young children as a classic “They tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat,” the history is far more complex.

Chanukah started as a civil war between Jews: aristocratic urban Hellenistic Jews who benefited from collaborating with their Seleucid overlords and rural radical anti-Hellenizers like the famous Maccabees.

Long before the Seleucid army intervened, there were plenty of Jews who were more than happy to adopt Greek culture, even to the point of undergoing painful and primitive foreskin reconstruction.

But those foreskins didn’t save them when Antiochus invaded Jerusalem to put down a rumoured “uprising”.

The historian Max Dimont’s describes Antiochus’ blundering intervention: “He marched his armies out of Egypt into Jerusalem, where he senselessly slaughtered 10,000 inhabitants without inquiring into their party affiliations.”